Sci-fi Films All Effects, Few Ideas

July 29, 2001|By Lewis Beale The New York Times

Even though film rights to Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred have been under option almost continuously since the book was published, a screen version will not be at the multiplex any time soon. "They just can't raise the money" for a film adaptation, says Butler, the only science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.

No wonder. In the current Hollywood atmosphere of whiz-bang special effects and lowest-common-denominator plot lines, it's not hard to understand why no one wants to finance the story of a contemporary black woman who travels back in time to the antebellum South, where she winds up a slave.

"I wanted to make slavery emotionally real," says Butler. "One of the things I wanted to get across was to look at the little humiliations, the little things that go into making a slave."

This is not exactly the subject matter filmmakers think about when setting out to make science fiction movies. Butler is not the only author of serious science fiction to be ignored by film producers. Notwithstanding the number of Star Wars and Star Trek spinoff novels in the nation's bookstores, science fiction as a literary genre has transcended its pulp origins and gained an enormous amount of credibility over the past 25 years. But the science fiction film seems trapped in a time warp, even as science fiction writers such as Butler, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson are delving into issues of race, sex, religion and technology's effect on humanity.

"People in Hollywood are afraid that anything that is perceived as an abstract idea will drive people from the theater," says Delany, whose books have been optioned but never produced. "They always say they have a good idea for a story, but in science fiction what you need is a good story for an idea, a story that will dramatize an idea."

Science fiction movies actually used to do this. In classic 1950s films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still, ideas about individuality, conformity and nuclear responsibility in the age of mass destruction were explored with subtlety, skill and a minimum of special effects. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey combined original effects with a cosmic story line about humanity's evolution into a new species.

This summer's big science fiction releases prove Delany's point that effects rule, and subtlety is out the window. Rollerball is a remake of a 1975 film about a society that channels all its violence into a game, while Jurassic Park III is a sequel that brings on more high-tech dinosaurs. Steven Spielberg's A.I., though based on Brian Aldiss' 32-year-old philosophical short story about intelligent machines, is more of a Pinocchio fairy tale in the E.T. mold than an inquiry into what makes us human.

Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel, Planet of the Apes, has been "re-imagined" by Tim Burton, even though the book has already spawned a successful 1968 screen version, four sequels and a television series. All these new films seem to owe their existence to advances in digital special effects.

"As special effects get better, and it's easier to do things you couldn't do on the screen, people are into what you can do with visuals," says Gardner Dozois, editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. "They put most of their effort into devising those effects, and they're not into sophisticated content."

In a sense, special effects are science fiction's cinematic birthright -- and its eternal curse. Visuals all too often take center stage.

"Hollywood wants to go for the flash," says Butler, "because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is."

Hollywood seems to have a love-hate relationship with the genre. There is little doubt science fiction movies can be lucrative -- six of the 10 top-grossing films of all time are science fiction projects (including three of the four Star Wars films), and Star Trek is one of the most commercially successful franchises in motion picture history.

Michael Cassutt, a television scriptwriter (Max Headroom, The Twilight Zone) who also writes a column for the Scifi .com Web site, thinks there isn't much of an audience out there for challenging science fiction. "Maybe 10 percent of the populace is really willing to be challenged by your big science fiction idea," he says.

Then there is the cost factor. Because science fiction films as Hollywood conceives them are expensive to produce, they must appeal to the broadest possible audience in order to return a profit. Which means more fingers in the collaborative pie and more restraints in terms of subject matter.

This does not mean innovative science fiction movies can no longer be made. With its creative visual effects melded to a story line filled with religious symbolism, The Matrix is often cited as a modestly budgeted production that shows how complex the genre can really be. Contact is highly regarded by some for taking a philosophical and metaphysical approach to the issue of first contact with an alien life form.

But productions like these are only hinting at the possibilities, according to Dozois.

"Maybe when every movie has wonderful special effects that are cheap to produce, then special effects will not be enough anymore. When the special effects are a given, then you will have to do something with the storyline and the characters."